Preeta Samarasan is a Malaysian author writing in English whose first novel, Evening Is the Whole Day, won the Hopwood Novel Award (while she was doing her MFA at the University of Michigan), was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009, and was on the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction. A number of short stories have also appeared in different magazines; “Our House Stands in a City of Flowers” won the Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest or the Asian American Writers' Workshop/Hyphen Short Story award in 2007.